When I started an ISP, I was amazed at all the free software for unix computers, all the amazing things it could do and the fact that the authors would help you in "newsgroups". I quickly noticed that Microsoft would thake the functionality of some free software and sell it to the yokels.

Lynx and netscape were early free www clients. MS added Internet Explorer to Windows but although it was not charged for on its own, one had to buy Windows to use it. Sendmail was free and powerful, MS charged for some sort of Exchange mail server for enterprises. Apache was the mos popular web server in the world and free, Microsoft created a web server and added a few features and charged for it. I was amazed that Microsoft could charge for what wae free.

Someone with the greater access to the public mind can take your ideas and popularize them. Ideas are not property, under copyright or patent. Ideas are free.

Yeah, I would definitely say that Mr D'Souza has, shall we say, glanced through your provocative tome. Of course, a less charitable individual might say that D'Souza, lacking any substantial ideas of his own, has strip mined your book for insights. Actually, Steve, I notice that kind of thing with increasing frequency.Some pundit, searching for material, grabs a few juicy ideas from your site, then publishes them under his own name, only after, of course, rendering them suitable for consumption by a PC readership. Steve, you must be the most read political "untouchable" in America.

If anyone still has any doubts that this guy is so full of himself and drunk on power read this book. He totally forgets that he is half white and throws his Caucasian relatives under the bus. Many people think he is a cool, calm character, but I think he is like a deer in the headlights that doesn't know what to do. Makes me wonder how long he can keep his smoke and mirrors act going. His house of cards can't stand for much longer.

If you can get past the abominably poor language and grammar, composite characters, changed names, dramatized events, and fictionalized dialogue, your reward is...a tedious, overwrought, melodramatic, self-serving memoir about nothing from a 34-year old dilettante. Whether your politics place you on the left or right, the fact is DREAMS FROM MY FATHER is a clumsy, amateurish effort with little insight and even less truth, and it probably would have been more compelling and weighty had Obama waited until later in his life, after he actually accomplished something, to reflect on and write about his formative experiences. In contrast to the image propagated by mythologizers in his campaign and elements of the media, Obama demonstrates little skill as a writer and his work here falls far short of publication quality. DREAMS FROM MY FATHER shows that it's probably best for Obama that he didn't pursue a career as an author, though inarguably not so for the country.

Sadly, it now seems that Mr. Obama had the book ghost written by neighbor Bill Ayers. Christopher Andersen's new book Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage due out soon says that Michelle said when the deadline was approaching Barrack shipped his files and tapes out to Bill Ayers to write the book.

His creditability would have been enhanced by admitting this upfront just as many, many famous "authors" do.

In one chapter, he talks about change, but he never says what he wants to change, he just wants to change. This narrative of course remains the same. He still talks of change but no one can figure out what he wants to change. He even admits he doesn't know what he is talking about when he says, "There wasn't much detail in the idea."

In the chapter he talks of change was during Reagan's tenure. He talks of Reagan, his minions and his dirty deeds. He wants change during a time of great change for the better. Reagan was responsible for creating optimism after the inept Carter years. Obama talks about change in the mood of the country. This period was a very optimistic time in American history. Reagan was responsible for ending the cold war without firing a shot, lowering interest rates from double digits, and creating an unprecedented economic boom. He also won almost every state in the union. I don't get it. What is it that Obama wanted to change?

When Obama listens to the "The Audacity of Hope" speech, he sees himself in this world of pessimism and despair. But, Obama's world was nothing like that. Obama never lacked for anything. This is the dichotomy of Obama's world. He lived a life between the privileged and the middle class, and he went to the top universities, but he envisions himself in John Kerry's two America's where he is one of the have-nots scratching his way to the top.

"How the HELL can you guys say Obama hates white people? He had a white mother for the love of God. He was raised some of the time by his white grandparents. He has some white friends."

Sigh. Try to think outside of these tired cliches (ie, some of my best friends/relatives are X...so I can't "hate" them).

For example, half of my family is Irish and the other half is British. I wasn't raised Irish-American so I don't identify with "the Irish"; I identify with the English or Anglo-American liberal (in the old sense of the word) cultural and political heritage. I don't "hate" the Irish, but I do sometimes find them slightly annoying.

Now apply that to Obama with the black/white thing. Consider who Obama identifies with, and why, and consider also that the white half of his family were "anti-racists", that is to say, self-hating whites (and if you don't believe that many "anti-racists" are self-hating, self-loathing white people, than you need to get out more). So both sides of his family "hate" whites in some sense - Obama is simply going down the path he was set on by his parents.

Many people think he is a cool, calm character, but I think he is like a deer in the headlights that doesn't know what to do.

Nothing new here."Leaders" like Mugabe, Mandela and any of the black liberation dictators were/are clueless when it comes to running their countries. Whenever reality catches up with them they resort to chasing whites, killing members of competing clans, and milking whitey for more money. The rest of the time they spend in endless discussions, driving around in their Bentley's, gorging themselves in their fancy homes, and arranging celebrations of themselves. Obama is just a more sophisticated version of the African Strong Man.

The final version shows other signs of — dare we say it? — bigotry. In his book, Mr. D’Souza makes many of the same arguments about the follies of race relations that I do in Paved With Good Intentions and he often uses the same examples to support them. In a book that bristles with thousands of footnotes, as his does, it is at the very least odd that my book not be referenced even once.

In fact, there is an amusing indication that this is deliberate. When Mr. D’Souza cites a magazine article his rule is to include the name of the author in the footnote. In a reference to an article I wrote for National Review, the name of the author does not appear. Mr. D’Souza seems to have been so determined to keep my name out of the footnotes that he broke his own bibliographic rules. Since he had decided to offer me up as a prominent bigot, he could hardly give the impression that he might have learned something from me.

Mr. D’Souza’s contemptible tactics did not even work. He has been pelted with absurd charges of racism, and there is no reason to think the accusations would have been any wilder if he had not savaged the AR conference. One newspaper has actually seen through his ruse. Writing in the Oct. 1 issue of the Washington Post, a book reviewer who is black writes that although Mr. D’Souza claims to be unbiased, he has obviously learned a great deal from his “mentors,” Samuel Jared Taylor and Michael Levin!

Not only was Taylor's organization extensively plagiarized by D'Souza for his book on race, both AmRen and Taylor were portrayed as the the most garbage-like Neo-Nazis in the pages of the same book! Talk about using every part of the buffalo.

How the HELL can you guys say Obama hates white people? He had a white mother for the love of God. He was raised some of the time by his white grandparents. He has some white friends.

The same white mother's who died of cancer? The same white mother who Obama left to die in hospital without ever visiting her once?

The same white grandmother Obama used as emblematic of typical nice white racism in his big race speech? This because she admitted feeling fear at being aggressively panhandled by a large black man at a desolated bus stop being a little old lady?

Not only were these the nice white people who raised him when his black family abandoned him, but they were the anti-racists self-loathing type of whites.

One can only imagine his feelings toward more typical whites as being not far from that of his 20yr spiritual mentor and adapted father figure Rev. Wright.

Steve, here's a fashion analogy for you. You're like a talented, obsessed, iconoclastic fashion designer who refuses to water down his line for frumpy American housewives. Other opportunistic designers come along and modify your ideas until they're less outrageous and more marketable. Of course, they become millionaires and land gigs on Oprah.

I second what Mercer says above. I seem to recall that your book was all about Obama and race, whereas from what I read in the online excerpt, D'Souza sees Obama's motivation as being an anticolonial one.

Of course, that's not to say that DD might have ripped off some of your ideas, but it's probably a good idea to read the whole book first, hmmm? And anyway, if you're annoyed that everyone seems to be plagiarizing your work, how about investing a little more effort in marketing yourself to a mainstream audience? I.e. did you really need to publish America's Half-Blood Prince through the VDare foundation (and not, say, Regnery or Basic Books)? The inability to get the quotation marks right (uniformly "smart," and curling the right way), the rendering of all references as URLs, and the annoying mark that precedes all reference numbers in the main text, added a further amateurish quality to the presentation of your book.

If he weren't president no one with half a brain would hesitate describing what makes Obama tick.

In reality it is just the opposite of course. If Obama weren't President no one would even think of him as particularly black. It's time to drop this contrived talking point about "racial revenge." Obama has less racial anger than most Irish people I know.

Reagan was responsible for ending the cold war without firing a shot, lowering interest rates from double digits, and creating an unprecedented economic boom. He also won almost every state in the union. I don't get it.

You sure don't.

Reagan was the unwitting recipient of lowered interest rates and the economic boom, which were the result of Jimmy Carter's policies.

Reagan famously expanded and extended the Cold War, until he finally decided to end the charade as he became mindful of his legacy as his Presidency was winding down.

So Michelle think's it "hell" being First Lady? Well, it can't be any fun for her to stand around the Formerly White House in one of her garish floral outfits and be mistaken for Mamie Eisenhower's upended sofa.

The commenters posting about Microsoft versus UNIX is apt. There are thousands of techies who believe to this day that various "free" software systems like UNIX or Linux are good and virtuous and that Microsoft Windows is evil. They think Bill Gates turned to the Dark Side.

Bill Gates didn't invent BASIC but he made his first money from it. He didn't invent MS-DOS either but he sold it to IBM and again made a lot of money. The same is true of Microsoft Word and many other products. If you think marketing and packaging are evil activities then Gates makes an ideal villain.

Much of the modern PC and Mac technology was actually invented or initiated in Xerox PARC. Yet Xerox did not prosper from these innovations - Apple did, Novell did and Microsoft did.

Similarly Steve has not and probably will not prosper from his many ideas and writings. If Steve really wanted to be rich and famous he would choose another outlet, write another book, appear on radio talk shows, or run for office. Writing a blog is a lot of work but it's not the kind of work that gets you ahead.

I thought it was just a vehicle, a pathway to power. Everyone's got to have some shtick, you know. Or, he has heavily identified with his black ancestors for some reason. People do that, you know. Makes 'em feel special.

What does Obama want to change? If you're a community organizer in Chicago, or Oakland or any other black urban area, the message you get from your clients is that they want to be "respected," and this means being respected simply for being what they are, black. "Change" means letting go of this notion that respect is somehow tied to trying, doing, achieving. Black people feel the beat. That should be enough. You know when you're stopped at a red light and the black driver behind is swaying and bouncing and grooving in your rearview mirror. Respect that. And this whole notion of a cash down payment. That ain't respect.

Hmmm, sport. I can't seem to tell how mommy dumping her bastard in favor of native basket weaving/ceramics/whatever could cause this little bastard, once he became a big bastard, to resent her (and her race), sport. That's the twoof, and nothing but the twoof, sport.

I have to agree with Mercer that DD's take is quite different from yours. Namely that Obama isn't really about race. Still he could have mined your book for useful tidbits and some psychological insights (does he speculate about his smoking and manic depressive cycles like you did?) and probably doesn't give you any credit. Anticolonialism was very very common among intelligentsia in the developing countries in the 70s and 80s with Fanon et al. DD writes remarkably well even granting the editing and research help he commands.

Wherever black liberation movements took over power, they turned on other races, whitey first. In Uganda Idi Amin chased out the Indians in addition to the Chinese, after first cleansing out the whites. In other African countries Indians, who often filled the void left by whites, were chased out. Liberation movements are per definition racist movements. So anti-colonial movements, which are always liberation movements, are racist movements.

If it were not so, the only requirement of anti-colonialism would be that the local population rule a country. But why then did blacks grab power at the expense of whites, Indians and colored in all southern African countries? Coz its about race and ethnicity.

D'Souza is just using anti-colonialism as a mask for racism coz anti-colonialism is fashionable amongst the liberal elite, whereas racism is out. So in this manner Obama can be masked as a closet racist but be paraded as an anti-colonialist, i.e. he gets to eat his cake as well.

D'Souza talking about Third Worlders and Beck talking about Liberation theology all miss the point: Obama is a Marxist, with an overlay of black power Marxism and anti-colonialism Marxism. That's it. It's that simple. But they don't want to say he wants to bring white people low so they deal with these indirect and only partially accurate description of his views. Wimps.

headache wrote: D'Souza is just using anti-colonialism as a mask for racism coz anti-colonialism is fashionable amongst the liberal elite, whereas racism is out.

Exactly. The whole book is about race. Cleary, colonials=whites and anti-colonials=non-whites. How that is not patently obvious is a minor miracle.

So in this manner Obama can be masked as a closet racist but be paraded as an anti-colonialist, i.e. he gets to eat his cake as well.

Much like he used Auma as a proxy to express hatred for whites and those African blacks he regarded as cowtowing to whites, while trying to portray himself as sympathetic to Auma, but remaining non-threatening himself. He's a transparent fraud. He's simply a more polished version of Jeremiah Wright.

I think his highest goal is to break the white (DD's colonial) power structure. In that, I think DD nails it. (I'm sure Half-Blood Prince does too, I've just not read it yet.)

Wrt DD borrowing liberally from Steve, you're most probably right. I read Ending Racism ages ago and thought it very good. We in the HBD sphere all swim in the same waters, so smart guys like Steve and DD are bound to come to the same or very similar conclusions. DD probably can get away with his views (i.e. get published) on Obama in this book, and on blacks in Ending Racism where Steve cannot, simply because DD is not white, and Steve is. Sad, but true.

More and more whites will wake up, and in the end, Steve may get his just recognition.

"Mercers take is disingenuous. Anti-colonialism is just code for racism. Wherever black liberation movements took over power, they turned on other races, whitey first. In Uganda Idi Amin chased out the Indians in addition to the Chinese, after first cleansing out the whites"

African anti-colonialists maybe racist and Obama is, according to Dreams, obsessed with race but they does not mean they share the same agenda and ideology.

Have you ever heard Obama say anything critical of Indian and Chinese people like Amin has? No because he does not care about them. Have you seen Obama show any concern about Africans besides his relatives in Kenya? No because he does not care about them either.

What Obama is obsessed with in Dreams is being accepted as a member of the black American community. That is why he joined Wright's church and sat in the pew and listened to anti American sermons for years. If black Americans bashed Indians and Chinese like Amin did Obama would probably criticize Asians but American blacks don't care about Asians.

I think Dreams is a well written book that anyone who wants to understand Obama should read. I also think Steve's book is good even though he has a more negative view on Obama then I have.

Souza's Forbes article is junk. He wants to make Obama into a third world champion even though Obama has never shown interest in third world concerns.

Many (if not most) of the most prominent anti-white blacks have been of significantly white ancestry (a point which others have written about).

Not surprising if you consider that it is usually the ones with significant white ancestry that have inherited enough white IQ to actually accomplish something, and they probably also share some of the same psychic battles as our dear president. They are forever enraged that they are not white enough to pass as white in white society, so must detest that which they cannot be to ease the internal conflict, and doubly make an effort to be black enough to be accepted in black society.

I find it fascinating that D'Souza has clearly revealed Obama's anti-colonial rage that he adopted from his Kenyan Father. The difference here is that Obama is waging his anti-colonial war against our country's oil companies, banks, and insurance corporations (if not all major corporations). The fools in the electorate have allowed a thin-skinned, narcissistic, petty politician into the country's highest and most powerful leadership position. Now they are whining about what Obama said he would do throughout his campaign (redistribute the wealth, submit to the unions and get a health bill passed that is now going to destroy our national economy if it is not drastically changed or repealed). And then we have the far left continuing to lament Obama's failure to Europeanize our country (a far left that really belongs in Europe and not here).

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You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

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"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.